'My neighbour's telly has broken my car'

An £80 TV transmitter box is being blamed for 140 cases of car key fobs failing over the past year.

Ofcom says that the 'TV senders', which plug into a satellite receiver and send the signal wirelessly to other TVs in the house, can jam the key fobs of an entire street's worth of cars.
It happened recently on Dimond Road in Southampton, when residents were baffled one Saturday morning to find that their cars wouldn't unlock.

The amount of fobs that had simultaneously failed suggested that battery failure on each was too coincidental.

Ofcom was called out to investigate, and found that one house had a TV sender.
A spokesman said that a "leakage" from the device, transmitting at the same frequency as the key fobs, was to blame. It asked the resident to switch the faulty box off, which worked – all the fobs began to work again instantly.

According to Ofcom, it has to send teams of people door-knocking when a case is reported on a street, to see how many people have been affected and work out who has the offending box.

So the moral is: if your neighbor insists on watching Sky in his bedroom without paying for Multiroom, the least you can do is buy an old car...